In July 2014, Mercury made our initial investment in Apto, the leading could-based CRM and deal management platform for commercial real estate brokers. We led Apto’s Series A preferred round of financing, with co-investment from Apto’s current seed investors. Apto is headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas (a terrific planned community north of Houston), with a secondary office in Denver. The company’s founder and CEO, Tanner McGraw, is a former commercial real estate broker who experienced first hand the pains of dealing with Salesforce and other non-industry specific CRMs. There were a few legacy software products that tried to address the specific needs of real estate brokers – but Tanner knew there was an opportunity for a much better product experience.
Tanner launched Apto in 2013. He and the early Apto team built their SaaS product on the Force platform, and very quickly began to scale. We met the company through three separate warm introductions. When we first met them they were at $500K ARR. Three months later, by the time we signed a term sheet, they were over $1M. They had also opens up their Denver office to have better access to Force developers.
We believe Apto has the ability to become the de facto Industry Cloud Company for commercial real estate. Houston is a logical launching pad for such a startup as it is a commercial real estate hub, with major offices of almost all the major commercial brokerage firms in the U.S. Almost all of the major brokers have large offices in Houston due to (i) the large number of Fortune 500 companies that call Houston their headquarters (26 – #3 in the US, and half of Texas); and, how spread out Houston is (much like Los Angeles), with lots of ground for commercial brokers to cover.
We are excited to help Tanner and the Apto team continue to build an industry-defining SaaS company!
You can read more about our investment in Apto here.
